California Charter School Seeks LMS to Facilitate Blended Model

This network is looking to provide a learning management system for their teachers to help facilitate a station rotation blended model.

State: California

Number of Students: 608

School Type: Charter School

Free and Reduced Lunch: 77.3%

Grade Level: K-7

English Language Learners: 39.8%

School Context

This K-8 network recently opened its first school this year and is expanding. Students come from an urban neighborhood. 82% qualify for Free and Reduced Lunch. The majority of students are identified as English Language Learners.

State of Technology

Teachers need a place to plan, store and deliver content. Students need a centralized place to access their lessons and activities. They are hoping to provide a way for teachers to build a library of resources. Additionally, they are looking to increase the efficiency of their blended model by being able to deliver content through this platform.

As of right now, teachers are writing instructions on the board for different stations. Students then rotate through different stations and complete the activities, some on the computer, some not. They believe that this method is inefficient and could be more personalized by groups of students.

Tech Needs & Requirements

The network is looking for a robust learning management system that includes innovative and intuitive features. Ideally, the tool can track class attendance, have weekly student/teacher goal-setting and some kind of way to track their progress of goals in a weekly, monthly, yearly progression. Ideally, they would like the tool to generate a default playlist by grade by subject, the teacher has the ability to customize that by student by class. They are willing to per-curate the content and tag it appropriately. Teachers can create create different pathways for different students or groups of students. This is a non-negotiable.

Students can access and manage content. Students will be able to access the tool for an overview of what they will need to learn for the class, but they also will be learning in a station rotation model. Students should be able to see and access their student profiles, personalized learning plans, content, including lessons and assessments, progress towards goals and a student portfolio would be a nice to have.

If the tool has formative assessment features, that would be a nice to have. The tool must connect to and/or contain proprietary content (or have the ability to create within the tool) and provide a method for storing and organizing the content used to create lessons and courses.

There should be a central repository where teachers can find, create and use assignments/courses based on grade, subject, standards, end of year target. They should also be able to build a library of resources. The tool should host a repository of third-party content like Khan academy.

Additionally, the school is hoping that the system contains instructional content authoring tools.The tool should allow for the creation of custom content playlists and these playlists can be created/edited by teachers/admins.

Ideally, these playlists can be auto-generated using a recommendation engine within the tool. The tool must be common-core aligned.

The students will utilize the tool.

Teachers will play a large role in curating the learning experience for students. They will be actively working on intervention when goals aren't met, and feedback will be given in small group/individual conferences.

Teachers must be able to create and customize different pathways for different students or groups of students. The tool must be Common-core aligned and have a tagging structure. Data needs to be downloadable and actionable, such as download to CSV. The tool needs to host third party software and create units, to be a central repository and resource library. Students should be able to see progression of goals, or visibility of weekly objectives. The tool must be Intuitive and user-friendly. The school offers 1:1 Chromebooks. The tool must provide actionable data so that the teacher can understand where students are in their learning path. They want to be able to act on it immediately. Ideally, they would like a tool that supplied various reports so long as they are able to manipulate them to suit their needs. The tool must integrate with Google Apps, Illuminate and Clever.